Hello world,
as many of you probably already know, Lemmy is an open source project and its development is funded by donations.
Unfortunately, as is often the case, donations amounts are often going down over time if people are not aware of their necessity. When older users leave the platform they may stop donating, while new users joining will typically not be aware of this and won’t start donating to even things out or even go towards an overall increase in donations.
All of the services provided by our non-profit Fedihosting Foundation are dependent on the development of FOSS platforms, which we can host without paying any licensing or other fees, instead only being required to pay for the infrastructure cost. We are currently investing a small part (€50 each) of the donations we receive in development of Lemmy and Mastodon, but the majority of the donations we receive are used for covering infrastructure costs. We’re currently just about breaking even with the donations we receive, but it’s certainly not enough to cover a large part of Lemmy or other software development costs.
We’re looking to support sustainable software development for all the services we provide and will post similar announcements on our other platforms to promote donations towards the respective development teams in the coming days.
You can find the original announcement by @nutomic@lemmy.ml below:
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/29579005
An open source project the size of Lemmy needs constant work to manage the project, implement new features and fix bugs. Dessalines and I work full-time on these tasks and more. As there is no advertising or tracking, all of our work is funded through donations. Unfortunately the amount of donations has decreased to only 2000€ per month. This leaves only 1000€ per developer, which is not enough to pay my bills. With the current level of donations I will be forced to find another job, and drastically reduce my contributions to Lemmy. To avoid this outcome and keep Lemmy growing, I ask you to please make a recurring donation:
Liberapay | Ko-fi | Patreon | OpenCollective | Crypto
If you want more information before donating, consider the comparison with Reddit. It began as startup funded by rich investors. The site is managed by corporate executives who over time have become more and more disconnected from normal users. Their main goal is to make investors happy and to make a profit. This leads to user-hostile decisions like firing the employee responsible for AMAs, blocking third-party apps and more. As Reddit is a single website under a single authority, it means all users need to follow the same rules, including ridiculous ones like censoring the name “Luigi”.
Lemmy represents a new type of social media which is the complete opposite of Reddit. It is split across many different websites, each with its own rules, and managed by normal people who actually care about the users. There is no company and no profit motive. Much of the work is carried out by volunteer admins, mods and posters, who contribute out of enthusiasm and not for money. For users this is great as there is no advertising nor tracking, and no chance of takeover by a billionaire. Additionally there are no builtin political or ideological restrictions. You can use the software for any purpose you like, add your own restrictions or scrutinize its inner workings. Lemmy truly belongs to everyone.
Dessalines and I work fulltime on Lemmy to keep up with all the feature requests, bug reports and development work. Even so there is barely enough time in the day, and no time for a second job. Previously I sometimes had to rely on my personal savings to keep developing Lemmy for you, but that can’t go on forever. We partly rely on NLnet for funding, but they only pay for development of new features, and not for mandatory maintenance work. The only available option are user donations. To keep it viable donations need to reach a minimum of 5000€ per month, resulting in a modest salary of 2500€ per developer. If that goal is reached Dessalines and I can stop worrying about money, and fully focus on improving the software for the benefit of all users and instances. Please use the link below to see current donation stats and make your contribution! We especially rely on recurring donations to secure the long-term development and make Lemmy the best it can be.
edit, as this was frequently brought up:
Will donations to Lemmy development go towards the operation of lemmy.ml?
It depends on the donation method used and is limited to around 2% of the minimum overall donation goal. The vast majority of donations is exclusively used for developer salaries.
lemmy.ml hosting is only financed by donations via Opencollective. All other donations go exclusively to developer salaries.
[source]
For donations via Open Collective, yes, a tiny fraction of donations towards Lemmy development will go towards the operation of lemmy.ml. The reasons for this include that lemmy.ml is used for testing new releases and also that it’s not worth maintaining a separate donation account for the instance. Additionally, it should be noted that the money going towards lemmy.ml hosting is just a tiny fraction of the funds that are being asked for. Hosting lemmy.ml costs around €100/month, which is only 2% of the stated minimum donation goal.
Fine, maybe we’re just talking past each other somehow. I’ll give it one more try, and I’ll try to be clear. This is the main point:
I understand your concern here, and I fully agree that if we were trying to control how .ml is moderated, then this would absolutely be a double standard.
My response is that we’re not dictating the moderation of the instance, we’re dictating that the developers of Lemmy should personally not participate in that moderation.
The moderation of .ml could be literally, exactly the same, with literally exactly the same bans, deletions, etc., as long as it’s not Dessalines doing it.
The moderation policies are fine; the devs acting as a moderator for a tankie instance is not fine.
Once again, we do not want to dictate how your instance is moderated. We do not care how your instance is moderated, other than finding it generally distasteful. We want to make sure that the devs of Lemmy are not the ones doing that moderating.
Also, this is orthogonal to the main point, but it’s worth mentioning:
You’ve put words in my mouth here. If .ml were a communist instance, I’d be fine with donating. It’s the fact that it’s specifically - a tankie, authoritarian, genocide-denying, human-rights-violation-supporting instance that aggressively silences all dissent just like the authoritarian, genociding governments they hold up on pillars instance - that I find so distasteful.
I would love it if the devs were actually communists.
I can understand your hesitation, however there is no way to verify who is doing the moderation, as .ml like many other instances including .world and .ee show all action as user “mod” to try to limit the amount of backlash for mod actions. I can say I personaly disagree with this, however it seems like the most common of the mod log listings.
I can say they both say that they do not activly mod anymore, they are only listed as admin 1) because they own the domain and server, because of the server being a test bed and 2) because by being admin they are able to push the last step beta tests to the server for testing. I can see no reason why I should not belive their statements, however I will admit it is merly me trusting their word.
How I see it having them listed as admin is a necessity of it being the primary testbed instance, and I have no reason to not take them at their word that they no longer are the active moderators, I do fully admit I could be wrong in this assumption, however given I have no evidence one way or the other, and in my personal interactions with them they have seemed to be true to their word, I see no reason to doubt that.
I’ve heard that a few of the third party mobile apps still show the specific moderator who took action, and I think other moderators/admins can see which mods took action as well. Either way, we would need some reasonable amount of proof/assurance that the devs had actually stepped back from active moderation, and this seems to be the non-negotiable sticking point for many users, including myself.
I am completely fine with them still being the admins of the instance because of its importance as a testbed. And, I think they should have a community that they belong to, especially when that community reflects their values and is so satisfied with them. The important thing for a lot of us is that they themselves do not take a direct, active role in the distasteful censorship that goes on in .ml.
As I told Nutonic elsewhere in this thread, I solemnly swear that as soon as I’m convinced that both devs have permanently stepped back from active moderation of .ml, I will set up recurring donations going forward and provide receipts.
Edit: It was in the lemm.ee thread that I told Nutonic that, not this one.